The Green Workplace and Human Behavior

JULIA KENNEDY: Welcome to Just Business, a series of interviews on global
business ethics.

Today we're discussing human behavior and the green workplace. Architect and
sustainability expert Leigh Stringer will shed light on this important component
of corporate social responsibility.

Author of a book called The
Green Workplace and a blog
by the same name, Stringer is convinced that LEED [Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design] green buildings are only a
piece of the puzzle to designing a sustainable office.

Leigh Stringer, welcome to Just Business.

LEIGH STRINGER: Thank you.

JULIA KENNEDY: Let's start where I left off in that introduction. As an architect,
aren't you supposed to be focused on designing new green buildings? So why have
you started to look at human behavior and workplace change?

LEIGH STRINGER: Well, there's no question that, working for an architecture
firm, we live and breathe green design, and the zero-carbon-footprint buildings
are all the rage these days, and getting to them is actually quite difficult.

In a recent study, we looked at a typical developer building and were trying
to figure out how do we really make this net-zero over the long haul, not just
on day one when we put the shovel in the ground and declare the building finished.

We realized that we couldn't get there alone, we couldn't get there with beautiful
design and nice green walls and perfectly energy-efficient mechanical systems
and all of that. We really needed more.

In fact, we did a study looking at commercial buildings that have tenants in
them and figured that around 60-70 percent of the energy used in a building
actually has to do with the tenants themselves, not necessarily with the building
itself. The energy that tenants use related to their servers, their technology,
their lighting, and the HVAC is actually a pretty significant portion. The part
that they can turn off and on actually does have a huge impact. So that's the
point where we realized we needed to do a lot more.

Another interesting study that we found out recently, and this kind of ties
in—it's a residential study, but I think this touches everybody and what
they're working on and how they're using their space at home and at work—that
is a study done by the World Business Council about six or seven years ago at
this point. It looked across six different countries and, across these six different
countries, hundreds and hundreds of residential units.

The focus was purely on energy. They found out that when they encouraged people
to insulate their windows and do all kinds of physical changes to their buildings
or to their homes, weatherstripping and all that kind of good stuff, they reduced
the energy load by about 30 percent unilaterally across these six different
countries and all these different residential types, which was pretty significant.

But then they found that conservation behavior could save another 20-30 percent
by unplugging things—my goodness, all these appliances that we say are
vampire eaters of energy; turning off lights; not everybody has an automatic
thermostat, so installing those. Just basically being aware of all the energy
they're using every day and clicking it off.

JULIA KENNEDY: Another study that I read about in your book that seems relevant
here is that actually we're not constructing new buildings that frequently,
especially in this economic downturn. So tell me a little bit about how there
are steps that companies can take in the short term to green their practices.

LEIGH STRINGER: Right.

So one of the things that I learned through talking to lots of organizations
about cool new ways that they could green their business and their buildings
and whatnot was that all these different strategies fell into one of four categories.
It's kind of on a spectrum.

On the one side are things like changing the design, the physical design of
the building, building a new building or upgrading the one you have.

Then there are things like operational strategies, which have to do with reducing
paper waste by going with double-sided paper or green paper. A lot of the procurement,
for example, in an organization might be to green what you buy and green how
you use it and how much of it you use and then think about how you deal with
the waste when it's done. All those have to do with pretty much organizational
policies, but maybe at a higher level kinds of things.

And then there's technology and all the different ways—you know, the cool
new apps out there that you can download yourself or your team can download,
for example, that will increase your awareness of your energy use at the workstation.
There is a little product called Green Print that I think is fantastic—it
will help you print more efficiently . Also there's a power strip that you can
just click off so all your electricity or your appliances that require energy
click off at one time. That's a simple way, just using a power strip. Or one
that has an automatic timer, since when you leave, you might forget.

And then there's all the human behavior stuff, which have to do with you remembering
to turn that power strip off or click off the light and things like that.

When it started off, it there were things that are harder for individuals to
effect. You know, not everybody is involved with designing a new building. It's
a few people in the organization, it's actually a very small group, and it takes
a lot of money to do that. The operations stuff, yeah, it's a little bit easier
to do, but it requires usually some sort of a policy change or some muckety-muck
in the organization to make a decision to change something.

Technology—you know, maybe it's a little bit easier to do. And your human
behavior you can change right this second.

So on the spectrum it's a lot easier to start with the human behavior and do
that first and then see what sort of effect you can have on the organization,
just yourself or your team or your department, and measure it and see how that's
working for you.

But I think organizations now realize, getting back to your point about the
capital cost of making these big choices and big design moves, that you can
do so much, as we were talking about in these previous studies, by just changing
your behavior or adopting a couple of new technologies and trying those out.

JULIA KENNEDY: Now, with behavior change often comes resistance. You know,
people have habits. So from a management perspective, how can managers who have
decided "we want to implement some green strategies in our company"—what
are some general ways—and you've done a great job in this book of making
it applicable across sectors—what are some ways of approaching employees
to really change the carbon footprint of the office?

LEIGH STRINGER: This kind of goes back to basic rules of change management,
I guess, you know, business school 1.01, but also just really understanding
people and where they're coming from when it comes to the environment.

I think when you ask somebody what you care about—"Why is the environment
important to you? Why are you a greeniac and why are you carrying the banner
for the environment?"—people give you very personal reasons: "It
has to do with my children; I want to see them grow up in a world that I had lived
in" or, "I met someone in a third-world country who lived in a deplorable
trash-ridden area," or something. It's a very personal story that gives
them kind of an emotional need and a desire to make change in themselves personally
as well as encourage it in others.

I think understanding that as a baseline is really important, and also understanding
that not everybody thinks the environment is the most important thing, not everybody
believes that the environment is in very much trouble. There is some interesting
debate happening out there about that. People tend to listen to who they believe
in the first place. So it's a little difficult sometimes to approach people
with a green card and say, "Well, don't you care about the environment?"
Well, they don't always or it's not their first priority.

So one way that we found that's pretty effective is to hit them from every angle:
It's about saving money; it's about doing the right thing for our community
and showing our involvement with our community on the social aspects of it;
or it is about saving our children; or it's about the emotional, the economic,
every business level that you can imagine. That's probably the most effective
way.

I think the other thing is not to try to eat the elephant all at once, but to take a tusk or something. Just take one or two things and prove your concept.
If you have an idea, you think you can save energy this way, take one thing
and do that well and then prove it. Use a metric and prove it.

The other thing that's very powerful is this idea of social influence. It's
very powerful in my five-year-old, of course, what her other friends are doing.
And, surprisingly, we keep at it even as adults. And so this idea of social
influence, you can apply that to individuals and having teams pit against each
other and encourage each other to change their behavior.

But you can also think of it in terms of benchmarking and talking to your advisors
or your boss or your CEO, whoever you have access to, and say, "You know
what, I've benchmarked other organizations just like us and they've seen the
following benefits. Wouldn't this be something that we should try? They have
a one-upsmanship on us."

I can't tell you how many times I'm asked for benchmarking in the design field—"Well,
are they also adopting alternative work? Are you also doing some sort of cool
car pooling? Well, hmmm, maybe we should also investigate that."

So it's all about making sure that you're not behind.
JULIA KENNEDY: Right.

You mentioned greeniacs, which is one of your terms for different personalities
that you might encounter in a workplace environment. I'm wondering if you can
go through the others, because when I read that section of the book I found
myself nodding, nodding, nodding. So if you could share with the audience what
those are.

LEIGH STRINGER: Sure.

I do a lot of facilitations of groups and organizations about greening their
building or greening their space or greening their organization in a case of
light. It never fails that four different types of people show up—not to
typecast, but to stereotype. Why not? Everybody else is doing it. It just seems
like one of four different groups will show up.

The first group, as you mentioned, is greeniacs. If you look that up on the
urbandictionary.com,
it's this term in use of late that very much has to do with people who have
drunk the Kool-Aid. They know that the environment is important to them and
they have done all this research. They've got solar backpacks. They already
have the carbon footprint app on their iPhone. They have geothermal in their
backyard.

What's great about this group—they're slightly annoying, I will say (I'm
one of them so I can say that). These guys are know-it-alls—they have
done all the research. So if you're an organization and you want to know what
a local solar panel provider is, they can tell you, "Absolutely, here are
five different companies. I already have done the research." So it's a
great group to rely on.

The second group I call business environmentalists. This group cares about the
environment but they particularly are interested if you can tell them it can
save them money and it affects business and improves business or increases market
share—"Hey, if we do a green product, that's really going to sell,"
or whatever. This group just eats it up. They have the ear of the C-suite often
because they are very practical and pragmatic about the whole thing, which is
great.

The third group is the largest group by far. I don't care what organization
you're in, it is a significant portion of corporate America in particular. These
are the green couch potatoes.

Now, the green couch potatoes are people that
if there happens to be a recycling bin right at their desk and in fact there
was no other bin at their desk, they might actually dump the paper into the
recycle bin.Or if they're on a campus and the shuttle bus comes by and they
walk out the door and the shuttle bus is exactly where they need it to be, they
would get in a shuttle bus and go and use that versus their single-occupancy
vehicle to go from building A to building B. This is a group that needs things
to be really convenient to them.

What is really important about this group is that, number one, they are the
largest group by far, over 50 percent, certainly 80 percent in most organizations.
We have to have them engaged. We have to make it so super-simple for any of
these folks to do the right thing without even thinking about it.

Because we
need them for all the green metrics. We need them to throw their waste out so
we meet our waste metrics, and to basically reduce the amount of materials they
buy or use because we need to reduce our raw material use, and energy of course.
So all these folks are really important.

So I've become obsessed around just how people work and human behavior because
it's that subconscious that we have to affect in our buildings and in our policies
and all kinds of things.

The last group are what I call skeptics. They fall into a couple of categories.
There are people who believe that the environment is not in trouble, and that
is fine. They are absolutely entitled to their opinion. The important thing
about understanding that group and having that group involved in a focus group
is that this is a group who will punch holes in everything you do. If you don't
have an answer back to them that's logical and thought out and meets a business
need, it will fall apart in a heartbeat.

The closet skeptics are the people that nod their heads, "Yes, good idea,"
and walk out and never think about what you're talking about again, don't even
remember it. They just have other things on their plate.

I think the thing about skeptics too, and we alluded to this a little bit earlier,
is that there are other things out there that companies are worried about and
that people are worried about. They're worried about their job. They're worried
about keeping the company in business. They're worried about will their team
member next to them be sitting there tomorrow.

So with this kind of climate, the environment is fighting with a lot of other
pretty urgent and pressing issues—security, you name it; there are all
kinds of issues of course that are on our minds. So we have to also weave into
the story how the environment feeds into all these other things and feeds into
a bigger story about a more sustainable business plan in the mega sense. That's
what makes things stick.

JULIA KENNEDY: I'm going to take on the role of maybe a super-couch potato
or a skeptic just to ask you a couple of questions about some of your proposals
in the book, which I'm sure you've gotten as you're working with these focus
groups.

One is you talk a lot about telecommuting as an alternative, make businesses
able to shrink their space that they have to have and to reduce the amount of
commuting that employees are doing. I'm curious. If a skeptic came to you and
said, "I have this employee that I'm really reluctant to supervise from
afar if they're going to telecommute"—I think that's a common concern
with telecommuting—how do you respond to that kind of skepticism?

LEIGH STRINGER: You have just described one of the most common pushbacks
that we get around telecommuting and alternative work in general. This is a
lot of what I'm involved in lately, is creating alternative workplace strategies
for folks and helping them come up with a plan like this.

The big issue with working remotely or managing a team remotely is trust. Trust
has to do with a manager being able to trust their employees to basically do
their work, do it in a timely fashion.

The other issue, which is closely related to this one, is that deliverables
are measurable. The product or the service or whatever is being provided as
part of this company, that you can see something measurable and that you don't
have to manage by seeing somebody. You have to manage by product—some sort
of outcome.

The problem, I think, with a lot of organizations is they have been managing
by sight for so long that it's difficult to pull apart "what I see my employees
doing and then what they're delivering for me and the quality of that."

And a lot of industries too, the way that they train their young people is by
saying that nothing beats overhearing a conversation on your team next-door
from somebody more senior than you, and that mentorship is crucial.

So I think when we go through and profile, say, a workforce and a worker in
an organization and say, "Are you a candidate for working remotely, even
for a day a week, but certainly on a full-time scenario?" we really sit
down and look at what they're doing, how long they've been with an organization,
how senior they are, how motivated they are—you know, it's their personality
as much as anything else—how trustworthy they are and how much their manager
feels like they can trust them. It's very much a case-by-case basis in many
instances.

But we've helped companies develop policies around this so they're very clear,
because I think at a certain point it's an entitlement—people say, "Oh,
you know, if I'm working for a company and so many people telework, I should
telework too." That's not necessarily the case. Everybody is in a different
situation.

I will tell you that organizations that have figured this out, that have put
the microscope on it and figured out how they can measure towards different
sorts of deliverables and metrics and that they can trust their workforce a
little bit differently, train managers—I spend a lot of time training good
managers on how to do this—they can see unbelievable results.

One pharmaceutical company I'm working with now has moved towards a work-anywhere
kind of environment, and some work at home as well. They're down to 30 square
feet assigned per person as opposed to the typical 150-square-foot-per-person
office. So dramatic real estate savings.

It does take a lot of work. There's not a direct correlation where you say,
"Okay, well, we'll chop a third of our workforce off and encourage them
to work from home and support their managers, blah, blah, blah, and then we'll
save all this real estate and square footage. Isn't that wonderful?"

But it turns out that there are additional costs. You've got to train folks.
You've got to set people up at home, my goodness, give them a really good dial-in
that they can get to the network, and they have a phone that they can easily
transfer back and forth.

The truth of the matter is that we're all working all the time—in the grocery
line; in bed, there are a large number of people who use their PDAs [Personal
Digital Assistant] in bed, including—

JULIA KENNEDY: Insomniacs.

LEIGH STRINGER: Including my husband.
JULIA KENNEDY: Right.

LEIGH STRINGER: Which is causing all kinds of other social problems. And
actually it's quite dangerous in many situations—in the car and the like.

But I think that this ability to work anywhere—I'm in a consulting group,
so a lot of us are on the road and moving around all the time. Email volume
is the way we kind of measure it. Or can I get to somebody if I need to reach
them, and are they responsive, and do they have the tools they need to get me
what I need when I need it?

It's surprising how things are changing. Technology is enabling us to do this
more and more and more every year.

JULIA KENNEDY: There are a lot of skeptics
that are in upper-level management. You've already talked about it a little
bit, but I'm curious how far you think that employees can really effect change
within an organization when they don't necessarily have buy-in from the top
down.

LEIGH STRINGER: If you happen to find yourself in an organization with a
C-suite or executives who have their eyes on other balls besides the environmental
ball and are really thinking that it's a nuisance or it's in the way of getting
real business done, I think the best way to come about it is with a business
case. That business case may be very simple.

There's a great example in the book. I wrote about this one guy at Google. I
recognize Google is a very deep-green company, but this example would apply
anywhere. This guy at Google was basically pretty frustrated because he saw
bottled water in every location. I don't know if you know anything about Google,
but they have these fabulous food and beverage stations that keep you there
for long hours. People always talk about the "Google 15"—I guess
you gain 15 pounds when you first start there. But they have all these bottled
water stations, and it's everywhere.

He said, "This isn't right. We're a green company. This shouldn't be how
we should go about it."

So he calculated how much money they spent on bottled water every
year and did a calculation on how much they might actually need to spend for
glassware or filtered water stations, things like that, as an alternative. He
came up with millions of dollars of savings. I can't remember the number exactly—it's
in the book—but it's a very large number.

He got on a Google dock and he emailed it around and said, "Let's start
a petition and here's the business case." So between a combination of a
huge number, a very large percentage of people who had signed his petition to
say "we should do this," and the fact that he was saving a significant
amount of money every year on bottled water, it was a no-brainer. It didn't
hurt Google, of course, that that was also part of the culture of the organization,
to act green, to be green. But I think that it's such an easy example of the
grassroots and how you can make a difference.

I think, at the end of the day, be proactive. If you're somebody in an organization
that you know—I mean don't be preachy, don't be too much of a greedy kind
of person—but be practical and do some research and find out what other
companies are doing just like yours, and figure out how to really save money
either on the cost side or to make money on the pro side, on the business side.
I think that is really hard to fight.

It also shows your ingenuity. Be careful if you have too many of these ideas,
because you'll probably be put on some sort of sustainability committee or,
heaven forbid, assigned it as a full-time role.

It is interesting, actually, organizationally. We talk to a lot of companies
about who were the green people in their organization who were assigned and
had some sort of accountability across the organization. It's a young group
of people, because they care, because they've done research, because it's part
of their belief system, and they have taken it on themselves to do things like
this and to actually make change happen.

JULIA KENNEDY: How within an organization should the green committee or sustainability
committee work? Should it be a department? Should it be people spread throughout
different departments? What do you recommend?

LEIGH STRINGER: I'm actually doing this for
an organization right now, an insurance company. We're starting this from the
real estate department, but we're trying to figure out how to save carbon globally
with this organization. In order to tackle those big issues, you've got to tackle
it at every level.

What we're starting to do as a process is to interview different people in different
departments across the organization—within the R&D department or the
actuarial department, the legal department, the HR, the communications, you
name it—and find out what they're doing and what they're measuring, what
sort of progress they've made, how they're reporting various metrics.

And then getting everyone together, because I think in most organizations it's
a very dispersed group of greeniacs or folks focused on these issues and they're
not thinking holistically because they are so focused on their department and
making things happen in their department.

There's this kind of interesting phenomenon that happens when you get all these
people together: They start to cross over and they start to see how "Gosh,
this procurement policy I'm writing here might actually greatly affect the procurement
on the building side. And, wow, I didn't even think about how all these things
were connected and what sort of impact it might have."

I think all these things pulled together are much better and much more holistic.
I think organizations that pull them together are doing a great job.

That's not always possible and resources are scarce these days. If you just
have your department or your team to work with, that's absolutely acceptable.
But to the extent that you can tie maybe even young people in the organization
together who are from different departments, who might be willing to volunteer
on their own time to do some events or some interesting social mission, say
for example in the community, that's a great way even at a level within the
organization. Even if it's not the top, it's a level to weave people together
and get them talking.
JULIA KENNEDY: Now, you work for HOK, which is a really large architectural
firm. Why are they interested in having you look at human behavior and that
aspect of sustainable workplaces?

LEIGH STRINGER: Well, the great thing about HOK is that if you are interested
in a topic, you are encouraged to pursue it deeply. I work for a group within
this architectural firm that focuses on strategic consulting, for lack of a
better word, like workplace consulting and real estate portfolio assessments,
where we talk to organizations at a high level about where they should be building
and why, and also really understanding how people work and how to support that
in physical environments, as well as leveraging technology and other stuff.

Through this I've been very interested in understanding the sustainable component
as well, because a number of architects across our practice have been really
deeply interested in green building. There's all kinds of partnerships with
the Biomimicry Guild,
which is very involved with biology and what's next on the frontier for super-green
materials and ways of thinking about building. Very cool stuff.

So I think there has been this kind of convergence of a number of, I'll say
for lack of a better word, specialized sustainable thinkers across our practice.
I think we realize, with almost no thought at all, that all these things are
starting to weave together, and the stories that we can tell that tie not only
our buildings to deep-green thinking on the biology side and engineering side—weaving
that story together is wonderful—but really understanding that buildings
are for people and that leveraging the behavior of our people and our buildings
is crucial.

So obviously, we've got these beautiful buildings, and if on day two they aren't
used well and used by the occupants of those buildings in a way that sustains
them and sustains the environmental metrics that we've set up and set out to
do, then we really aren't going to see the results and the return that we hope.

JULIA KENNEDY: Why are you personally passionate about these issues and why
did you become one of those sustainability experts within your company?

LEIGH STRINGER: I went with my husband to see a movie by Al
Gore, whom you might have heard of, An
Inconvenient Truth. My husband is very into politics. We had just gotten
through—I say "we"; it was a family affair—an election.
I'm not very into politics myself and was just OD'ed over it. So the last thing
I wanted to do was see a movie by Al Gore. But we heard it was good.

I went. The part in the movie where Al Gore gets on that stepladder or some
sort of cherrypicker, and there's a huge PowerPoint presentation in the background,
and he's talking about I think it was carbon footprint or something, some incredible
metric about increased use of energy across the globe—probably it was carbon—and
the huge exponential growth of the stuff. And then, of course, he gets on the
cherrypicker and follows it up and up and up. It was just very dramatically
done, of course.

But I would say that it was at that point I thought "Oh my God, really, seriously?"
I don't know. Everybody has their different—

JULIA KENNEDY: It was just recently for you.

LEIGH STRINGER: It was. I was pregnant with our first child. I walked outside
and I was practically in tears thinking "Wow, I do not want this to happen to
her and I don't want to leave this place." Thinking about it now I'm tearing
up. I don't normally do that.

But it does make me think, because I've just had another child, so it's another
momentous occasion, thinking about their lives. I just can't imagine that I
would live my life without trying to do something about it.

JULIA KENNEDY: I want to ask what do you see for the future. Do you see this
as sort of an inevitable change, that people are going to get on the bandwagon
and it's going to happen and it's just a matter of how we do it? Or where do
you see, both personally and at work, these kinds of green practices going?
How can we effect their implementation?

LEIGH STRINGER: I think you've phrased it well or framed it well. We can
either be a part of the solution or we can just let things happen.

The "just letting things happen" scenario is not so happy. Gas prices
are going to go up. I know they fluctuate and I know they've gone down and up.
But just conceptually there's a nonrenewable resource that we're heavily dependent
on. We're debatably creating all kinds of wars on it. It's not so good.

On the energy side, I think materials as well. You know, you just look at the
amount of waste around the world and it's not so great.

So one future is we let it go and we just see what happens. There are fewer
and fewer resources. There is more and more pricy gas. The haves have more,
the have-nots have less. It's pretty nasty actually when you think it through.

I am optimistic. I do not think that is going to happen. I think that people
are very smart and they'll figure this out. Whether they have an environmental
cause behind their motivations or not, I think they'll realize it's just good
business to be sustainable and they'll think about creating a business that
doesn't have to depend on renewable resources and a business that solves problems,
doesn't create new ones.

It's that innovative thinking, it's that out-of-the-box thinking, that you as
a person and an organization can affect and can change by taking the way we
do things and just flipping it and putting it on its head. However that works
in your organization—if that's a brainstorming session, if that's using
the rules of improv and the yes/and and yes/and and there's no bad idea kind
of thing—whatever it takes to encourage us all to think a little differently
about not only where we work but how we do it, who we do it with, and the outcomes
we're trying to achieve in our business and in our daily lives.

I'm reading a book now aboutTheHappiness Project, which I really love, written
by a local New Yorker. I'm only just now starting it. But I am drawn to this
idea of happiness and of how do we create a place that's happier for ourselves
and for our children, is less stressful, doesn't keep us on the road all the
time and working 24/7. What is the right place for us?

We should be selfish when we're thinking about being sustainable, right? It's
not just about saving the Earth. It's about saving ourselves from a really scary
work/life imbalance and keeping things real and grounded.

So my hope and my wish for anyone out there who wants to make a difference within
their organization and become more green in their personal practice is that
you just try it. You just give it a shot and try something different. Back to
work, try something that you might not have tried in the past. Buy greener vegetables
locally grown or something like that, and put it into your practice every day.
And then really pay attention on what it does for your stress level and your
happiness, because I think that it's all tied together.

JULIA KENNEDY: Leigh Stringer, these are wonderful words of wisdom. Thanks
so much for joining us on Just Business.

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